The grading is done, the semester is over, and the manuscript beckons. As my mind tries to find its way back into the book, I have been re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I have copied down so many passages that have made me reflect on Woolson’s life and work. I wonder if Woolf would have thought any differently about the…
I have been reading a lot about how women writers continue to face doubts about their legitimacy, from without and within. (The latest a lengthy interview with a group of women writers.) And I have been reading about how today’s women writers would like to be known simply as writers, despite knowing how unlikely it (still) is that critics and readers will simply…
Woolson decided to end her life when she was fifty-three, almost fifty-four, years of age. Her last year was full of pain and worry about how she would financially and physically manage to maintain her independence. It is easy to see that there was a complex set of reasons she chose to end her life. But was it a “choice”? I have been…
One of Woolson’s close friends was John Hay, a famous man in his day who has been largely forgotten in ours. A new biography of him has just been published by Simon & Shuster. The author, John Taliaferro, contacted me a while looking for a good portrait of Woolson, and he was kind enough to have an advance copy of the book sent…
Henry James was born today in 1843. He was, arguably, Constance’s closest friend during her fourteen years in Europe. Henry in the 1880s, when Constance knew him After they lived under the same roof in the Villa Brichieri on the hill of Bellosguardo outside Florence, Constance started calling him “Harry.” That was a family name, just as she was called “Connie.” Although no…
I just watched a fascinating video of a recent discussion between the biographers Hermione Lee of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing and Gary Giddins of the Levy Center for Biography in New York. I was glued to every 1 hour and 5 minutes of it. Hermione Lee was so engaging and absolutely thrilling in her wide-ranging discussion of what she called the…
My class finished our discussion of East Angels last night. I was afraid they wouldn’t like the ending and would find the heroine rather contrived, but they did not. Having read The Portrait of a Lady first and understanding how Woolson was responding to and revising James in East Angels made it so much more meaningful and gave us a useful frame for…
Today I have been writing about Constance’s and Henry James’s visit to Stonehenge, in the autumn of 1884. It was so cold and blustery that they could barely speak to each other. On the way back to her lodgings in Salisbury, their carriage had to pull off the road and cower in a ditch for a half hour while the wind roared overhead.…
I have been rereading Woolson’s 1886 novel East Angels with my class on Henry James and the Women Who Influenced Him. I haven’t taught one of Woolson’s novels before because they are not in print. But now there is a reprint of the original novel available by a publisher called Forgotten Books. It’s not perfect, and the students have complained that the type…
In 1878, Woolson wrote a poem called “To Certain Biographers” in which she condemned the vogue of tell-all biographies that exposed famous men’s vices and weaknesses. She wrote, We give you Scanty thanks for all your labors; yes, Doubtless ye write truth, for barren places Are upon the mountains; none the less Are they mountains, and their silent grandeur Scorns your petty skill,…